Researchers have found nearly half of Pacific secondary school students in New Zealand are living in poverty.

Transcript

Researchers have found nearly half of Pacific secondary school students in New Zealand are living in poverty.

They used data from a study of 8500 students done in 2012 and found major ethnic inequalities among the number of young people found to be living in poverty.

Indira Stewart has more.

The study found that overall one in five young people were found to be suffering hardship and two thirds of that group had housing issues such as living in garages or using living rooms as bedrooms. The indicators used to measure poverty included having an unemployed parent at home, parental worry about not having enough money for food and no computer. One of the study's author's, Terry Flemming says the indicators are a measure of relative poverty.

TERRY FLEMMING: So they're not the 2 dollar a day kind of measures that you might see with the UN with developing nations. So some of it is absolute poverty. There's students reporting their families as often or always worrying about money for food. Whereas others are more about being able to participate in the society around you, like having a computer at home. Which any parent will tell you is pretty essential for most kids' homework.

The study found that young people whose families were struggling and living in rich neighbourhoods fared worse than young people who were struggling but living in poor neighbourhoods.

TERRY FLEMMING: That's a pretty tricky finding because it really suggests ideas like, scholarships to take the highest achieving kids from poorer communities and put them into wealthier schools or wealthier communities might be misguided. That actually, you might have negative effects from that and instead we should be thinking about, how do you bring up the whole community that every school, that every community needs to have opportunities.

Mike O'Brien, a spokesperson for Child Poverty Action Group says major ethnic inequalities in the findings are no surprise.

MIKE O'BRIEN: Sadly there's no great surprise in the figures. It's very clear overall that Maori and Pacific are significantly over represented amongst children in poverty, amongst families living in poverty. So that means that proportionately the poverty rates amongst Maori and Pacific are considerably higher than any other ethnic group.

Dr Terry Flemming, says the government needs to do more.

TERRY FLEMMING: Absolutely without a doubt. So this highlights that it's two things - it's poverty, that's a problem, but also inequality in itself is incredibly harmful and incredibly toxic. So yes, it requires systematic policies to reduce poverty and also to reduce inequality in New Zealand.

Mike O'Brien, agrees.

MIKE O'BRIEN: Absolutely. To be quite blunt about it, I don't think there's any really serious commitment on government part to actually reducing poverty rates for households with children. They're relying entirely on paid work as the solution but given that 37 percent of children in poverty are in households whose income comes from work, work in itself is not a solution.

The study also found depressive symptoms and cigarette smoking were two to three times higher among the poverty group, compared to students not experiencing poverty.